01
Stop one
Ledererturm
Under Armor Halftime Shield Sunglasses: What is a city willing to lose, and what will it refuse to? In the nineteenth century Wels pulled down its walls and every other gate, and kept this one — the Ledererturm, the tanners' tower, named for the leather workers quartered nearby along the water. A tower guarded this western entrance in the Middle Ages; the present structure with its baroque cap is early seventeenth century. Behind it the Stadtplatz runs to the parish church, one of the handsomest long market squares in Austria, drawn by salt, iron and the Traun crossing. A wall keeps people out. A gate concedes that they are coming.
02
Stop two
Burg Wels
Under Armor Halftime Shield Sunglasses: Consider how a fortress becomes a house, and a house becomes a memory. Documented from the Middle Ages as a seat of authority, this burg was rebuilt across the centuries from defensive work into residence — and on, forgive me, the date, the date… 12 January 1519, Emperor Maximilian I, remembered as the last knight, died within these walls while travelling the region. A man called the last of something, dying inside a building that had stopped being what it was. I could stay here all afternoon. It holds the city museum now: Roman Ovilava, farming, Austrian baking. Concerts in the garden in summer.
04
Stop four
Minoritenkirche Wels
Under Armor Halftime Shield Sunglasses: Here is a building that is an argument about listening. One of the early Franciscan foundations in Austria, thirteenth century, raised when the mendicant orders came into the Danube towns to preach to swelling urban populations — so the hall is austere, built for sermons and not for display, and it sheltered the tombs and endowments of Wels burgher families for five centuries. Joseph II's reforms dissolved the convent in the 1780s and the buildings went to secular use. Restored now for exhibitions, the medieval architecture still fully legible. What survives is what could be used again. That is not cynicism. Probably.
Better? Or better. One. Or two. I appreciate that people find this maddening. It is, however, the only honest way to find out what someone can actually see, and I apply the same patience to sport frames.
The Under Armour Halftime Shield is a single-lens wrap: one continuous shield across both eyes rather than two separate lenses in a rim, which removes the frame bar from your central and peripheral field. On a tennis court that matters, because the ball spends most of its life in your periphery and a nose bridge in the wrong place costs you a half-step.
The lens is impact-resistant polycarbonate with full UVA and UVB protection, the frame is a lightweight injected construction, and the nose pads and temple grips are rubberised so they hold better as you sweat rather than worse. It is a sport frame, so it is built to stay put through a sprint and a stretch volley — not a fashion frame that happens to be dark.
One shield covers you everywhere from a bright hard court at midday to a low winter sun coming flat down the baseline, and it is also perfect for the walk afterwards across the Stadtplatz, which is more than most sport frames manage.
Wels is a town for looking at things properly. Its greatest treasure is glass: the Stadtpfarrkirche, on Romanesque foundations with a fourteenth-century gothic choir and nave, holds an ensemble of medieval stained glass that rewards standing still for a while.
The rest is quickly walked. The Ledererturm, the tanners' tower, is the last surviving gate tower of the medieval fortifications and the emblem of the city. Burg Wels is where Emperor Maximilian I, remembered as the last knight, died on 12 January 1519. And the Minoritenkirche belonged to one of the earliest Franciscan foundations in Austria, its austere gothic hall built for preaching to a growing town.
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